At the 2010 Venice film festival, when Essential Killing won the special jury prize, its director Jerzy Skolimowski announced: "For those who like me – I'm back; and to those who don't like me – I'm back."

There's much of the man in that wry, pugnacious stance. But what does "back" mean for a Pole who will be 73 this May, and who took nearly 20 years out of a film-directing career to be a painter? How will "back" turn out for one of film's least compromising mavericks? As far as I can tell, Britain is only the second large market to give Essential Killing a release (after Poland) – with no takers in the US. But a story about a Taliban fighter (Vincent Gallo) who kills Americans in the Afghan desert, is captured and tortured, then flown back to Europe and able to escape into the deep snow, will not compete easily with Adam Sandler.

Skolimowski claims Essential Killing has no direct political meaning. He says his protagonist may not be Taliban, even; the whole ordeal might be a case of mistaken identity. So it's an abstract epic of pursuit and survival – desperate figures in a wild landscape – with very little dialogue but a thrilling camera style and stunning, untouched terrain? Here's one more film in the Skolimowski canon that no one could have anticipated or can easily explain.

He was born in Warsaw in 1938. His father, a member of the resistance, was killed by the Nazis. After the war, the boy accompanied his mother to Prague as she worked in the Polish embassy, and then later Skolimowski entered the Polish film school at Lodz. He began as a screenwriter: he wrote Innocent Sorcerers for Andrzej Wajda, and collaborated with Roman Polanski on the script for Knife in the Water. Skolimowski was a boxer, and one early film was a documentary on fighting, but then he made a series of edgy, low-budget features, often playing the lead himself. His breakthrough came in 1967 with Le Départ, a comedy with Jean-Pierre Léaud, acted in French and shot in Belgium. It won the Golden Bear at the Berlin film festival and promoted Skolimowski as a "European" director.

In the next 12 years he made five films that kept changing everyone's view of him. The Adventures of Gerard was a humorless costume adventure that seemed beyond his grasp. But then came a masterpiece, Deep End (1970), filmed in Germany but set in London, about the obsessive love felt by a boy (John Moulder-Brown) for a more experienced girl (Jane Asher). Comic and surreal, this is too little known.

Skolimowski followed that with a very flat King, Queen, Knave (adapted from a Nabokov novel), and then The Shout (1978), from a Robert Graves short story. This is an unsettling adult fairy-story about magic and power, starring Alan Bates, John Hurt and Susannah York. Four years after that, he made the entrancing Moonlighting, with Polish construction workers cut off from home on a London job. With Jeremy Irons in the lead role, this is the biggest hit Skolimowski has ever had.

It seemed as if his career might take off, and he made The Lightship in 1985, another neglected film, in which Klaus Maria Brandauer plays a coastguard captain opposed by Robert Duvall as a gentlemanly pirate. It is suspenseful, funny and full of psychological insight. Then came Torrents of Spring (1989), a dull version of Turgenev, whereupon Skolimowski took up painting in LA.

He has always said he only wants to make pictures he likes, but the results have been so variable. Great work and outright failures sit side by side. In person, he is droll, handsome, tough and self-contained. But he may not always be interested enough in explaining deep feelings. Essential Killing is spectacular and mysterious, but the bleakness is an ordeal. Never mind; comfort is not always what we need. Deep End, The Shout and Moonlighting would be reasons enough for regarding Skolimowski as an isolated, intractable master.